The Workshop on Non-Player Characters and Social Believability

Call for Papers to the 2018 workshop on Non-Player Characters and Social Believability @ FDG

The 2018 workshop on Non-Player Characters and Social Believability intends to be a point of interaction for researchers and game developers interested in modeling, discussing, and developing systems for Non-Player Character (NPC) social behavior and social affordances. This can include behaviour generation based on social and behavioural science theories and models, systems and approaches for social believability, social affordances when interacting with NPCs, and more. We invite participants from any discipline in order to create a broad spectrum of approaches to the area.

In the context of this workshop, NPCs in games are not limited to opponents and allies, but can play any role. From the beginning of digital games, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been part of the main idea of games containing acting entities, which is to provide the player with "worthy" opponents (NPCs). However, as the medium has evolved the requirements on the underlying technologies have changed. The ever expanding complexity of modern games has increased the demands put on the NPCs as believable characters, especially if they are to cooperate with human players. In particular, three facets of NPC behavior are of concern for the workshop: (1) the interplay between intelligent behavior that is task-related, (2) the emotions and meanings that may be attached to the events in the game world, and (3) the social positioning and interaction of deliberating entities. This workshop aims to address this by putting forward demonstrations of work in the integration of these facets aspects of NPC behavior, as well as models and theories that can be used for the emotional and social aspects, and for their integration for generative use.

We welcome submissions rooted in game technologies, computer science, social science, art, design, and the humanities.The workshop will be dedicated to demonstration and discussion, with time for collaboration and comparison of theory, method, practice, and results in fruitful cross- and interdisciplinary meetings.

The workshop is co-located and organised with the 2018 Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) conference in Malmö, Sweden. The exact workshop date is TBD, but will take place sometime during the conference (August 7-10 2018).

Topics

This workshop accepts submissions related to NPCs and social believability construed broadly. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

designs created to explore hypotheses

realized prototypes, demos, and applications

technological approaches: then, now, and the future

behavior modeling and behavior design

philosophical approaches to sociality and believable behavior

generative or procedural content

trade-offs between autonomous characters and control over storylines, and dialogue

authoring social behavior

social interactions involving groups

connecting contextual modeling to animation and speech/sound

provocative ideas

Cancellation

Unfortunately we have had to cancel the workshop this year. Our sincerest apologies for any inconveniences this may have caused.